But GRUB can be installed without mounting partitions. I have problems with LILO and multiple distros installed in case when one distro recognizes my hard disk as /dev/hda and another one as /dev/sda. When I mount partitions and try to install LILO it complains something about that. Maybe I don`t know how to use LILO correctly but GRUB works without problems since I don`t have to mount partitions.

I have installed Vector 5.9 Deluxe edition and installed Lilo on the root partition. I have grub on a multi boot system and just added title Vector 5-9 root (hd0,13) kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda14 ro initrd /boot/initrd savedefault bootto the existing grub menu.lst file and all went well. I have used Lilo in the past and it never gave me any problems. I guess it is what you are use to using that makes it easy or not. When I started using Linux the only boot loader that came as default was Lilo and after a while I got use to using it. Now I am use to grub and don't have a problem using it, all though there is another one that I can't think of the name but Forsight Linux uses it and I can't at the moment get it to multi-boot, but if it becomes the standard I will put the time into finding out how it works.

Grub's naming system for partitions is actually very close to what some commercial UNIX flavors do. If you think grub is confusing take a look at how Solaris does it sometime

My main reason for generally preferring grub is the flexibility it offers. Of course, now that the developers have refused to backport support for larger inode sizes, effectively killing support for ext4 and the newest versions of ext3 lots and lots of people have gone back to lilo. I expect when grub2 comes out a lot of people will migrate back to grub if the new version works as it should.

I honestly don't know. I do know that the Linux community is pretty forgiving of long periods without a release and abandoned release schedules. Look at the history of Debian releases for a good example. Enlightenment is another. I'm not sure E will ever see a 1.0 release.